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Inside a Dance Studio is a blog hosted by Pegasus Studios with the aim of celebrating, discussing and learning about how dance can help support and foster healthy and happy children, adolescents and adults. This blog is inspired by our experiences as teachers and owners of Pegasus Studios, a dance studio primarily dedicated to art and health in children, from the ages of 2-20, give or take a few years!

Monday, January 16, 2012

An Interview with Janice Pomer

Photo credit: Barry Prophet

Today’s blog takes a closer look into the
choreographic process that goes into creating the beautiful performances in
Dances of Offering. After one of her rehearsals, Janice Pomer, our modern dance
teacher at Pegasus, allowed me to interview her about a piece she is
choreographing this year. Here's what she had to say:

Jessica: Hi Janice, could you tell us a little bit about
your dance background and what you're up to now?

Janice: I've been a performing artist in dance, theatre and
music since the mid 70's. For the first 15 - 20 years, from the mid 70's to the
early 90's, there was a lot of scepticism about people being multidisciplinary
and now it's wonderful seeing how many people are multidisciplinary performance
artists. As a performer I've embraced many different performance disciplines
and in the last 12 years or so I've been focusing on teaching modern dance and
also on a lot of writing. I write about the creative process, creative and
dramatic movement, and choreography, and those books are published
internationally and used by educators and dance artists around the world.

Jessica: What is the title of your piece for the Pegasus
Performance Group this year?

Janice: This is a piece about the
brain and brain overload. The title is "Sometimes I think I think too
much"

Jessica: What is the concept for the piece?

Janice: It's a human experience. We’ve all experienced what
it’s like when your brain is buzzing while you're
lying in bed at night trying to sleep and you start thinking about all the
things that you didn't do or need to do, or when you're trying to focus on one
job and you keep being distracted by your brain's interest in something that is
totally mundane and wonderful, like looking outside and seeing the clouds. It's
a very human experience and it’s fun for the kids because they're going through
it. They've got exams, they've got their dance stuff, they've got
responsibilities at home. Some days in class kids come in and say, "my
brain is going to explode", so I know they can relate personally to the
situation.

Jessica: Why did you decide on this concept?

Janice: It was an interesting
process. I have not worked with this group of young dancers before, and they're
all from a number of different dance disciplines. I was looking for something
that could help make them a cohesive ensemble and that's when I decided to go
for a more theatrical piece that I could use as a catalyst to introduce certain
modern concepts and to let them have some fun exploring a whimsical and
humorous aspect of human nature.

Jessica: What has been the biggest challenge that you've
faced so far in this process?

Janice: I think the biggest
challenge was that once I established what I was interested in exploring
thematically, I knew that it would require a special sonic composition to
accompany it. My partner, Barry Prophet is a composer and percussionist. He
works with experimental music, sound art and computer assisted music. Barry was
happy to create a piece for me but he's busy with a number of other projects.
There was only a short period of time that he could work on the composition so
the challenge for me was to articulate all of my ideas to Barry before I
started rehearsing with the dancers. Barry reached into his incredible array of
sound files and created a fabulous piece. He manipulated voices so they sound
like beautiful watery music, he has voices that sound really rough like they're
being heard over a weak cell phone connection, and he included some great
percussion. The music was the biggest challenge. Barry did it and it’s
phenomenal!

Jessica: Why did you want to be involved with the Benefit
Show and the performance group?

Janice: I love the benefit. I love
the idea that the dancers are dancing for others and not for themselves. I love
the fact that it resonates to what I believe is the essence of dance. Dance for
me is a way of connecting to the world. Dance is a kinetic art form, it's not a
sport where the goal is to win. Dance is art and art is communication. It is a
gift to be able to dance and gifts are for giving. In this day and age with the
popularity of so many competitive dance shows on television young dancers can
lose sight of the joys of dancing with others and for others. That’s not to
discredit competitive dance programs. A lot of hard work and dedication is
involved in competitions, and there can be great value in competing, but there
is also great value and great merit in dancing for others.

Jessica: What does this cause in specific mean to you?

Janice: For the past ten years
Dances of Offering has been alternating between global and local charities.
Last year we reached out to support children in Haiti and this year we’re focusing
on something that impacts directly on the Pegasus community. A large portion of
our students were born at Toronto East General and when I see kids come to
class with stitches or taped rotator cuffs I know they've probably been to the
ER at East General. So raising money for TEGH is fabulous -there's a real
connectivity for the students. They can say, “Hey, I am raising money for the
people and the organization that has helped me, my friends and my family."

Thank you Janice for an amazing and enlightening interview!
Come to Dances of Offering on February 12th at the Betty Oliphant
Theatre to see Janice’s piece and many more! To buy tickets visit
www.dancesofoffering.myevent.com